Status Update for our First Product, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots

Eureka is currently in the finishing stages. That means a lot’s already done, including 100% of the writing and artwork, virtually all of the editing and proofreading, and the cover. So what’s not done yet? Three things: polishing, layout, and the indexes.

Work in Progress

I’m currently applying a final coat of polish to the text, and have two out of four chapters completed: fantasy plots and the GMing chapter. I’m mostly done with sci-fi plots, and have all of horror still to go.

On the layout front, our graphic designer, Darren Hardy, is working as fast as I can send him text to work on. I’m the roadblock here, not him!

Our indexer, fellow Gnome Stew author and Eureka co-author and -designer, Matt Neagley, has done all the grunt work already. It’s incredibly slick: He’s written a program to generate the indexes, of which there will be four (!), and is now waiting for completed, post-layout text to run it on.

After all that is done, there are a few smaller steps still to go, including a full once-over for the final product. Which leads to the big question: When can you buy Eureka?

The short answer is that preorders should open in July. We’ll be able to narrow that down to an actual date a bit later in the process, and we’d rather get it right than rush it.

We’re shooting to have the book to our printer in early or mid-June. Once they have the book, they need to set it up for printing, print a proof, overnight the proof to me for approval, and get that approval before they can start printing copies for sale.

Sometime in there — I’m still not 100% settled on when — we’ll start taking preorders. A nice meaty sample of the book will be available, and we’ve got a couple of other things up our sleeves, too.

I’m sure there are lots of details I missed, but that seems like enough for a first post. If you have questions about Eureka, I’d be happy to answer them.